The Marietta Journal

SECRET SORROWS.
They suffer most who suffer alone.
Each heart knows and hides its own bitterness. There are people who bruit their troubles about, who hawk them as wares in exchange for sympathy. But these are not the people who need sympathy most; these are not the ones who mourn as those without hope. The real sufferers are those of us who wrestle all the night long with our griefs like Jacob did with the grappling angel, and who hide them away behind a smile when daylight comes, as a dove folds its wings to conceal the arrow that has pierced its vitals. The finest acting in the world is never seen on the stage. The real tragedians and dramatists go in and out of the marts of trade and the meeting places of society. They are men and women who talk and laugh and live like other people, while deep down in their bosom a tragedy goes on with no audience but the eye of God—a tragedy in which the fanged worms of an irremediable grief are gnawing and swallowing the core of a human heart. Sometimes when we hear ripples of tinkling laughter, how little we suspect that instead of bubbling up, it is pumped up from the hollow depths of a soul that has shaken hands with happiness, and bid hope an everlasting farewell.
Sometimes when we are tickled with the sound of the merriest songs how little we dream that the heart of the singer is breaking. If every heart that breaks could be heard as a noise, the din of the explosions would make the world an uninhabitable pandemonium: and if all the hot tears that fall unseen upon pillows in the silent watches of the night, could be turned into one river's channel they would desolate the land with a flood.
After all, it is strange that man ever laughs. Every step he takes is toward his own grave. Man is a creature that comes to us labeled "from the indefinite past to the indefinite future." Time, the tomb-builder, is his only friend, since he unlocks the only gate through which man may flee from his hounding troubles.—
Life opens like a morning in May. but its close is a brown and murky autumn, filled with biting winds and barren trees, and across the gloom of its shaded scenery, all silently they pass before us, faces we shall see no more. Life is a battle at best. In marching through it we have to face tempest oftener than we find flowers.
Those who die young are wrongly reckoned unfortunate. They only reach home ahead of us, and get in sooner out of the storm.
Nobody but an inspired writer could ever have said, "Each heart knoweth its own bitterness." That one little sentence stands in the place of the ten thousand volumes it would require to describe the degrees and kinds of bitterness of a repentance that came too late; it may be the bitterness that finally crystallizes over the soft but rayless sadness of an unrequited love: it may be the bitterness that hangs about the haunting memory of a near one and a dear one, whom we crushed with coldness, and learned too late that "we never prize the music till the sweet voiced bird has flown."
But whatever the specific cause may be, the bitterness is there, only to go out with the candle of life. God help the people who have a secret sorrow. The world can't do it
But even the bearers of bitterness in the heart, even the victims of a secret sorrow, may have one dream of sweetness that will come to pass by and by. Some day under the sound of a song that no man can sing, and in the presence of a multitude that no man can number, and in front of a throne that stands in the midst of a sea of glass, the angels will unbuckle every burden from the chafed and bending shoulders of those who have accepted the invitation, "Come unto Me," and who have found the Promiser of "I will give you rest." Then the repentance that came too late will be turned into the "repentance that needeth not to be repented of," the bitterness that hangs about the memory of those we wronged and crushed will be blotted out by their presence and forgiveness; those upon whom our love was wasted here may love us there with a love that is undefiled by flesh. Secret sorrows may gnaw, but they cannot annihilate.
And they will be cast out like unclean spirits when we stand in the presence of Him whose shadow is brighter than focalized suns, and of whom the prophet said, "He shall wipe away all tears from their eyes."
-Columbus Enquirer.